Tangent's Tangents
A Self Insert Fanfict from Beyond by Tangent!
Based on a possible after effect of "Otaku PC" by Metroanime.
Expanded upon with the express permission of Metroanime.
Possible additional scenes by Metroanime (doubtful, but you never know...)
Pre-reading and editing assistance by:
Metroanime;
Lord Talon;
Howard Melton;
Nevrmore;
And some guy named Steve
DISCLAIMER: 'Ranma ½' and all characters therein belong to Rumiko Takahashi, Shogagukan, Kitty, and Viz Video. 'Sailor Moon' and all characters therein belong to Naoko Takeuchi and Toei Animation Co. Ltd. Tenchi, Bubblegum Crisis, Riding Bean, Cyber Punk, Shadowrun, X-Com, and sundry others all belong to their respective creators and associated companies as well (which should worry some of you...). The original concept for the Otaku PC fusion was Metroanime's. This fanfict has been produced for my own enjoyment and to pass on without profit. Other characters that come into play in this fanfict may or may not be pulled from other sources (including other fanficts, RPGs, manga, anime, literature, or possibly even *GASP* American comic books!).
CHAPTER TWO:
Tangent yelped as she experienced an affinity for a glass of water.
Or, it might be more proper to say, she experienced sensations normally reserved for such a glass of water. Such as being swallowed and speeding down a tube as a fluid. This was then followed by something unlike being a glass of water, which was landing with a resounding *thump* on a round section of some sort of pavement.
"Owie..." Tangent rubbed her rump, which had taken the brunt of the landing. "Well, any dimensional transport you can walk away from is a good one, I suppose," she mumbled as she waited for the little squiggly lights and dots to retreat from her vision. The crowd noise was obvious even before then, but at first she thought it merely more disorientation.
Tangent hadn't actually been around as long as her three-hundred-sixty plus years of accumulated memories would otherwise seem to indicate. Roughly a third of the imprinted experience had to do with an analogue in a Star Wars timeline, from the twilight decades of the Old Republic. Another third dealt with her life in a Galactic Planetary Alliance universe, which wasn't nearly as large as the Old Republic, and had fewer known races, but had meta-powered beings. Yet another third was from a Terra which had super heroes such as the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the Rangers. Even so, she never actually directly experienced any of these worlds as her memories of having done so actually belonged to those same analogues. A fact that she was at least subconsciously aware of on some level.
Even the first real dimension that Tangent had visited that wasn't her one of origin wasn't particularly impressive to her. Granted, most of that time had been spent dealing with one sort of mental trauma or another, pretty much souring most of the experience. The paths of Underhill and the local veils of the faerie realms connected to that particular mortal world were stark and lifeless, impressive only with their morbid sterility. Then, just when she had passed through enough veils to reach a living faerie realm, a troll had appeared, causing her to retreat into a random mortal plane. Mortal plane being defined as any universe that was neither Heaven, Hell, astral, ethereal, nor fey. This actually left quite a bit of leeway, when all was said and done.
Thus, even as the dimensionally wandering techno-sprite that she thought that she was, the gremlin gaped at the scene around her.
The first thing that struck her about the buildings was that they were predominantly green. The rock used for these buildings obviously had a high amount of copper oxide present, though there was reddish and brownish brick buildings as well. The street below had a golden sheen, but as she *was* a gremlin she could tell it was actually some iron pyrite imbedded in the stone that made it look as if there were streaks of gold in the pavement.
There was also a lot of wood present. What made the buildings strange was that the City Planning Commission had obviously been deranged if not merely absent altogether. Many of the buildings looked as if they could have been plopped down straight out of "Slayers" or some AD&D world. The exceptions were what made Tangent wonder for the sanity of the local government.
A tall building of gray stone had gargoyles and spikes that made it look like something out of Gotham City or perhaps Paradigm City in "Big O." Not too far away, the red torii archways and peaked roof of a Shinto shrine, beyond that was a small tower equipped with some sort of dock arrangement about five floors up. That there was a sailboat in the process of being tied to one of those docking cradles only helped identify the structure.
All of this was a distant second to the truly bizarre part of this scene - the crowd.
There was a crowd of what could only be D&D style Hobgoblins, wearing military uniforms and marching in precision as the crowd parted to either side of them. That one of them was carrying a *Klingon* sword was strange but somehow looked perfectly fitting for this crowd.
There was a three foot tall bipedal mouse wearing what looked like Colonial gear (including vest and coat), apparently trying to haggle with a lamp merchant who looked an *awful lot* like a Velociraptor from "Jurassic Park". The Velociraptor, Tangent idly noted, was wearing a monocle in one eye and his expression was clearly dubious despite the very different facial configuration.
There was a centaur mantis arguing loudly with a group of elves, apparently regarding the price of some sort of flute or recorder that the mantis sold at his (her?) shop.
There was a dark-skinned elf playing cards with a dwarf, and apparently not doing well from the elf's frown and the dwarf's grin. The same café had three groups of very curvaceous women that Tangent tentatively identified as Nymphs of some kind, mostly due to their general lack of apparel and the 'feel' that they had. Some of them were nude, and most of the rest merely nearly so, with attire designed more to enhance their natural beauty rather than for any sense of modesty. The few who were modestly attired for whatever reason still had the same feel as the others, so Tangent still tentatively classified them as nymphs as well. The waitress was nearly as curvy, and had at least three knives on her person that Tangent could see from where she was.
The crowd walking by continually was just as varied. There were dwarves and centaur-mantises and humanoid mice. There were winged elves and dark elves and even a couple of sea elves (though this latter were obviously experiencing some difficulties with their current environment). There were near-humans whose hair moved like flame, and others with fur and tails and feline derivation. There were bipedal dinosaurs and pixies and dryads and more.
"Excuse me," said a voice deeper than the human average. "Miss?"
It took Tangent a moment to blink and realize that she was being addressed. Also notable was the shadow that had just fallen over her. She turned and looked up. And up. And up. And then up some more. Tangent was used to dealing with beings larger than herself. Her natural height was about eight inches, give or take a sixteenth of an inch, although she could get as short as six inches to as tall as her current four feet. Some beings were exceptionally large though, and still impressed her with there overall size and mass.
The face was obvious. Broken flattened nose, one tusk jutting up from a lower lip, eyes the color of the bottom of a deep well. An ogre. An especially big variety that looked like the sort who would bench press truck engines. Of the tractor-trailer variety.
"Eeep," said Tangent, not especially feeling up to fighting off an ogre at this time.
"You're blocking the teleport receptacle, miss, would you care to mosey on?" The ogre indicated the platform that Tangent had landed on.
"Oh, of course," said Tangent, quickly moving off. A glance behind revealed the ogre taking a rag out of one pocket and cleaning off the intricate pattern carved into the platform before ambling off. Tangent checked her skin, and decided that it was probably time for another bath. Gremlins were, as a rule, rather clean entities as their bodies broke down and neutralized all sorts of toxic substances. Still, gremlin sweat could sometimes get mildly corrosive. Not enough to be harmful to living tissues, but metals and plastics could be slowly deteriorated if kept in contact with these acidic oils. Plants, on the other hand, often benefited from these same oils, so a dry 'bath' involving rubbing herself with leaves still attached to a tree or bush would do as well as a more traditional bath involving water.
Of course, if she could get some lye and or pumice soap, a good steaming hot soak sounded suitably relaxing. Maybe even setting aside some of the lye for a tasty mug or two. Still, it wasn't particularly urgent at the moment, and if she didn't keep moving at least a little, she'd get trampled in the crowd.
Moving with the general flow of people, Tangent was able to see how bizarre her environment truly was. A ship went floating overhead, despite the fact that it was breaking laws of aerodynamics in so doing. The ship was built to resemble some huge barracuda and was made largely of wood. Her senses were able to tell that the fish-ship had some odd combination of technology and magic keeping it up, but not the details. Something worth looking into later perhaps.
The crowd triggering a touch of claustrophobia, Tangent popped down to her true height of eight inches and manifested her wings, flying up to the height of the majority of the roofs nearby - about three stories. Away from the crowded and cramped street, she could see literally dozens of the aircraft, everything from simple barges to ornate fantastic craft modeled on either fish designs or birds of some kind. Magical carpets and brooms competed for airspace with winged elves and ships that could have been sketched out by Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. Sylphs and pixies could be seen flitting about on their own errands, along with some who were clearly wizards using spells to bypass the crowds below.
Something else beckoned her attention. A clock tower thrust up from the labyrinth of streets below, showing the time as being six o' clock. Why then was the sun directly overhead?
Another dark shadow passed overhead, and Tangent suppressed a flinch. A dragon, huge and powerful looking, cruising through the air without more than a glance at her. If that much. You could never be sure with dragons.
Tangent blinked at the realization. Here, in *this* city, even though she had seen no fellow gremlins - she would merely be slightly exotic. Unlike the last world, she could fit in here with nary a care. The question remained - what now?
* * *
Captain Penn Straum shook his head at the unintentional antics of one of his new deckhands. "'Take my nephew for a voyage or two, Straum,' he said, 'the boy will be a natural with the lines and rigging,' he said." The grizzled dwarven captain snorted. "What the addle-brained ninny neglects to tell me is that Davin is barely of age and is still going through one of those growth spurts that turn the exceptionally awkward into the truly graceful! Assuming that they even survive the experience!"
Capt. Straum watched as the lanky elven lad in question tripped over his own feet while attempting to secure one of the mooring lines to the air dock. Something that Straum would have to have words with his first mate about, but the lad *had* seemed to be getting over his awkward period lately, so perhaps their wasn't anything untoward about the matter after all. Still, the boy's family probably expected him back in reasonably good health at some point, and telling them that the lad had gotten himself killed in Emeraldis while attempting to perform a routine task would probably be a bad thing.
Just as the dwarven captain was about to call out for one of the crew to relieve the young elf and send him up to the ship (and relative safety doing something else useful instead), the boy did indeed stumble again. This time falling off of the air dock all together. Capt. Straum noted in mute horror that the safety line that was supposed to prevent green hands from falling to their deaths had somehow become wrapped around the lad's neck.
Sure enough, the poor elven lad stopped, but oddly enough without the sudden jerk. Capt. Straum looked on in stunned disbelief as the line that would have doomed the boy was still slack, Davin having been caught by a green woman who had suddenly appeared standing on the side of the wall.
* * *
Tangent was still flitting around, looking at the strange air ships, when she saw one of the various linesmen stumble and fall off of his perch. Zipping over to intercept the unfortunate individual, she popped back up to her four foot size, planted her feet on the wall, and extended an arm out. She was still nearly knocked off the wall when she caught the fellow though, and it took her a moment to steady herself after having slid back several feet. Once she was sure of her bearing, Tangent started walking up the wall to where he had fallen from.
"Ah, thanks miss..." the boy halted awkwardly as he stared at how the green woman with the tail was simply walking up the wall as if it were the ground. Sure, there were spells that simulated spider-like abilities, but all of the ones that he heard about required that the recipient actually crawl along the surface in question like a spider.
"You're welcome!" Tangent chirped, happy to have helped. "You might want to unwrap the safety line from around your neck," she further advised. "That could prove nasty of even fatal if nobody is around to catch you. Besides, your grip is squishing my breast, so I'd thank you to at least shift it to some other location."
"Oh! Ah... sure!" the young elf stammered, embarrassed. He hastily removed the line from his neck and shifted about uncertainly, not knowing where to hold on to this girl once he was done. "Err... My name is Davin Quesyph..."
"And I'm Tangent. Pleased to meet you!"
"If you don't mind me asking... How are you doing that?"
"Doing what?"
"Y'know... Walking up the wall like that?"
"Well, first I put one foot in front of the other," Tangent explained as if to someone *really* young, "and then I do the same with the other foot. Just repeat the cycle as needed and pretty soon simple bipedal locomotion will get you just about anywhere you care to go..."
"I meant on the wall..." Davin clarified uncertainly.
"Oh, that! Localized gravitic anomaly!" Tangent beamed at the lad, glad he wasn't as slow as he first appeared to be.
"And that means?" Davin wondered why he was asking. She was obviously some kind of spell caster, given her vocabulary, and she might do something dreadful if he kept asking her how she did things. For example, she might answer his questions.
Sure enough, Tangent launched happily into a lecture about how gremlins could stand, walk, or even run along any surface that they are at least in rough contact with, as if that surface was where the plane of gravity was pulling them. Jumping with this ability wasn't advisable unless the gremlins in question could either be sure of a 'landing' point, or could manifest wings and fly.
Davin came to the conclusion that Tangent was indeed a mage of some sort, as she continued her lecture even after setting him back down on the dock he had fallen from. Granted, she changed topics from describing gremlin abilities to what kind of knots would be useful for mooring lines, but Davin had been hearing that one for nearly a month now anyway...
* * *
Captain Penn Straum was sufficiently happy at the survival of young Davin that all Tangent had to do was mention that she was thirsty and they ended up in a tavern.
Well, *after* an interesting docking at some weird airport. Square swimming pool like "docking pads" on one side, pavement and what looked like hammocks elsewhere.
This particular ship landed in one of the little ponds. It turned out to be a cargo transport carrying something called "toofa leaves" and clockwork mechanisms from someplace called "Nihon".
Which brought Tangent to one of the taverns located around the "airport" looking over the odd drink list.
There was small beer, of course. Also ales and beers and wines, feywine and something called "skullcrush", another thing called "dwarvil" and something else called "hobgoblin cocktail."
"Got anything with arsenic and some trace metals?" Tangent asked the waitress, not terribly surprised that a waitress around here was a seven foot tall human female radiating magic from several concealed weapons.
The waitress gave an inquiring look to the dwarf who merely shrugged. "I'll see what I can find."
"If not, I'll have whatever's the most toxic," Tangent amended, hoping not to put the waitress too far out of her way.
"So," Capt. Straum started once the waitress had left, "Ye seem to have some experience with ships, Miss Tangent."
"Some," Tangent admitted, wondering how to explain the multiple templates that comprised her collective experience. After a moment, she decided to just treat it as if she was a melding of all of them, which was true enough anyway. "My grandfather used to take me sailing from time to time. I was supposed to get his boat after he passed on, but grandma sold it before it could be turned over to me..."
"That's terrible!" Davin exclaimed.
"Depends on your point of view," Tangent stated. "I was too young to take responsibility for it at the time anyway, although I'd have liked to have at least gotten some say in the matter." She shifted tact from her former human existence at this point, combining that of two of her other aspects instead. "Anyway, I got some more experience serving on nautical vessels for Veridia, as well as on aircrafts for Silica. When it didn't eat into my training that is."
"So you *are* a spell caster!" Davin proclaimed, feeling that his earlier observation had been correct. Capt. Straum said nothing, being content to listen for now.
"In a manner of speaking, although not much more than any other warrior caste gremlin is."
"Gremlin?" Davin had never heard of gremlins. Capt. Straum, on the other hand, had heard of them, but knew of several varieties. Some innately good, some just as naturally evil, and most deriving from faerie kind. A handful of the rest where actually incorrectly identified as gremlins when they were actually something else, whether they were imps or transformed mogwai.
"Techno-sprites, derived from the old Fey Tuin race that the faeries came from," Tangent explained. "We branched off due to our affinities for cold-iron and toxins. The records are poor, but it is commonly believed that our ancestors were cursed to become gremlins due to these immunities. It's hard to say for sure though."
"Like tinker gnomes?" Davin was horrified, having had several bad encounters with tinker gnome inventions already.
"Don't be insulting," Tangent admonished. "A gremlin's prerogative is making and breaking, and a gremlin's vocation is to do either of those well. Tinker gnome devices are amusing, but please, don't compare us with a race of self-defeatists!"
"What do you mean?" Davin asked.
"What she means, lad," Capt. Straum interjected, "is that a tinker gnome that actually succeeds in completing their life quest and invents something that works, is considered to be a failure."
"Well, I *will* admit that, on average, tinker gnomes are more creative than most gremlins. We are very good at tinkering with and repairing existing devices, or demolishing things, but few of us have the inventive spark to actually come up with something new. That's why we like to hang around humans and other creative races so much. We have this great drive to be industrious, to build and destroy things, but without that creative spark to direct us we tend to be at loose ends..."
The conversation was interrupted briefly by the arrival of their drinks. Tangent sipped hers and noted with some disappointment that the toxins were purely alcoholic in nature. Not that she was drinking to get a buzz, as alcohol did nothing of the sort for gremlins (some breeds drank rocket fuel to relax, some required neurotoxins to simply knock them out for a while - Tangent's variety tended to get sleepy with chocolate). No, what Tangent was after was something to make her too poisonous to eat for a while, which was the main reason most gremlins seek to supplement their diets with toxins.
Most alcohols simply weren't lethal enough, and even when they were, tended to be metabolized and broken down into something harmless too quickly by gremlin physiologies. Not that the practice did much good on worlds like Silica, where the native flora and fauna was so poisonous that a gremlin couldn't hope to become toxic enough for the wildlife to consider them inedible.
"If ye be needin' work, I could always use another hand that knows her way around a ship," Capt. Straum offered. "Ye said that ye were warrior caste?"
"Yep! Sixty plus years of training in the Alpha/Omega School of Weapon Mastery, some training in unarmed combat, and Master Marksman with any ranged weapon that I can aim myself!" Tangent stated proudly.
"Well, how good can she be, if she doesn't have any equipment..." Davin mumbled, looking the nude gremlin over jealously, feeling that his position on the Hammers High was being threatened. Capt. Straum silenced him with a glare.
"I don't have any equipment because I don't have anything that can change scale when I do. It's a bit awkward traveling with anything to have to have two or more sizes for everything," Tangent stated. "Besides, my instructors in the Alpha/Omega School of Weapon Mastery would be disappointed in me if I couldn't make a weapon to use in a battle that I had enough warning about."
"Make a weapon?" Davin was a bit taken back by this. "Like a club or a staff or something, right?"
"Staves are good, but there's also swords, axes, pole arms, crossbows, siege engines..."
"You can..."
"Kid, the motto of the Alpha/Omega School is: To build a weapon is to know it, and you must first construct one of its type if you want to learn to use it. Live with this weapon. Eat, sleep and breathe with it. Dance, sing and celebrate with it. Mourn, grieve and suffer with it. To master a weapon, you must then destroy what you have constructed. For then you will know its beginning and end."
"Perhaps ye'd be better off signin' up with the Shadarian Explorer Corps instead, lass," Capt. Straum sighed. "I couldn't possibly pay ye what ye'd be worth to a ship like mine."
"If you say so..." Tangent replied uncertainly.
"Aye, I say so," Capt. Straum insisted. "Besides, I may end up bein' paid to haul yer ass around on my ship anyway, and in any event ye'd be makin' more than I could pay ye straight up! We'll just head for City Hall on the morrow and get ye an application. Ye should do well, as I don't know of any other gremlins in the S.E.C. Ye could explore some of the toxic zones for them at the very least."
"Well," Tangent admitted, "it sounds interesting at any rate..."
END CHAPTER TWO...
A Self Insert Fanfict from Beyond by Tangent!
Based on a possible after effect of "Otaku PC" by Metroanime.
Expanded upon with the express permission of Metroanime.
Possible additional scenes by Metroanime (doubtful, but you never know...)
Pre-reading and editing assistance by:
Metroanime;
Lord Talon;
Howard Melton;
Nevrmore;
And some guy named Steve
DISCLAIMER: 'Ranma ½' and all characters therein belong to Rumiko Takahashi, Shogagukan, Kitty, and Viz Video. 'Sailor Moon' and all characters therein belong to Naoko Takeuchi and Toei Animation Co. Ltd. Tenchi, Bubblegum Crisis, Riding Bean, Cyber Punk, Shadowrun, X-Com, and sundry others all belong to their respective creators and associated companies as well (which should worry some of you...). The original concept for the Otaku PC fusion was Metroanime's. This fanfict has been produced for my own enjoyment and to pass on without profit. Other characters that come into play in this fanfict may or may not be pulled from other sources (including other fanficts, RPGs, manga, anime, literature, or possibly even *GASP* American comic books!).
CHAPTER TWO:
Tangent yelped as she experienced an affinity for a glass of water.
Or, it might be more proper to say, she experienced sensations normally reserved for such a glass of water. Such as being swallowed and speeding down a tube as a fluid. This was then followed by something unlike being a glass of water, which was landing with a resounding *thump* on a round section of some sort of pavement.
"Owie..." Tangent rubbed her rump, which had taken the brunt of the landing. "Well, any dimensional transport you can walk away from is a good one, I suppose," she mumbled as she waited for the little squiggly lights and dots to retreat from her vision. The crowd noise was obvious even before then, but at first she thought it merely more disorientation.
Tangent hadn't actually been around as long as her three-hundred-sixty plus years of accumulated memories would otherwise seem to indicate. Roughly a third of the imprinted experience had to do with an analogue in a Star Wars timeline, from the twilight decades of the Old Republic. Another third dealt with her life in a Galactic Planetary Alliance universe, which wasn't nearly as large as the Old Republic, and had fewer known races, but had meta-powered beings. Yet another third was from a Terra which had super heroes such as the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the Rangers. Even so, she never actually directly experienced any of these worlds as her memories of having done so actually belonged to those same analogues. A fact that she was at least subconsciously aware of on some level.
Even the first real dimension that Tangent had visited that wasn't her one of origin wasn't particularly impressive to her. Granted, most of that time had been spent dealing with one sort of mental trauma or another, pretty much souring most of the experience. The paths of Underhill and the local veils of the faerie realms connected to that particular mortal world were stark and lifeless, impressive only with their morbid sterility. Then, just when she had passed through enough veils to reach a living faerie realm, a troll had appeared, causing her to retreat into a random mortal plane. Mortal plane being defined as any universe that was neither Heaven, Hell, astral, ethereal, nor fey. This actually left quite a bit of leeway, when all was said and done.
Thus, even as the dimensionally wandering techno-sprite that she thought that she was, the gremlin gaped at the scene around her.
The first thing that struck her about the buildings was that they were predominantly green. The rock used for these buildings obviously had a high amount of copper oxide present, though there was reddish and brownish brick buildings as well. The street below had a golden sheen, but as she *was* a gremlin she could tell it was actually some iron pyrite imbedded in the stone that made it look as if there were streaks of gold in the pavement.
There was also a lot of wood present. What made the buildings strange was that the City Planning Commission had obviously been deranged if not merely absent altogether. Many of the buildings looked as if they could have been plopped down straight out of "Slayers" or some AD&D world. The exceptions were what made Tangent wonder for the sanity of the local government.
A tall building of gray stone had gargoyles and spikes that made it look like something out of Gotham City or perhaps Paradigm City in "Big O." Not too far away, the red torii archways and peaked roof of a Shinto shrine, beyond that was a small tower equipped with some sort of dock arrangement about five floors up. That there was a sailboat in the process of being tied to one of those docking cradles only helped identify the structure.
All of this was a distant second to the truly bizarre part of this scene - the crowd.
There was a crowd of what could only be D&D style Hobgoblins, wearing military uniforms and marching in precision as the crowd parted to either side of them. That one of them was carrying a *Klingon* sword was strange but somehow looked perfectly fitting for this crowd.
There was a three foot tall bipedal mouse wearing what looked like Colonial gear (including vest and coat), apparently trying to haggle with a lamp merchant who looked an *awful lot* like a Velociraptor from "Jurassic Park". The Velociraptor, Tangent idly noted, was wearing a monocle in one eye and his expression was clearly dubious despite the very different facial configuration.
There was a centaur mantis arguing loudly with a group of elves, apparently regarding the price of some sort of flute or recorder that the mantis sold at his (her?) shop.
There was a dark-skinned elf playing cards with a dwarf, and apparently not doing well from the elf's frown and the dwarf's grin. The same café had three groups of very curvaceous women that Tangent tentatively identified as Nymphs of some kind, mostly due to their general lack of apparel and the 'feel' that they had. Some of them were nude, and most of the rest merely nearly so, with attire designed more to enhance their natural beauty rather than for any sense of modesty. The few who were modestly attired for whatever reason still had the same feel as the others, so Tangent still tentatively classified them as nymphs as well. The waitress was nearly as curvy, and had at least three knives on her person that Tangent could see from where she was.
The crowd walking by continually was just as varied. There were dwarves and centaur-mantises and humanoid mice. There were winged elves and dark elves and even a couple of sea elves (though this latter were obviously experiencing some difficulties with their current environment). There were near-humans whose hair moved like flame, and others with fur and tails and feline derivation. There were bipedal dinosaurs and pixies and dryads and more.
"Excuse me," said a voice deeper than the human average. "Miss?"
It took Tangent a moment to blink and realize that she was being addressed. Also notable was the shadow that had just fallen over her. She turned and looked up. And up. And up. And then up some more. Tangent was used to dealing with beings larger than herself. Her natural height was about eight inches, give or take a sixteenth of an inch, although she could get as short as six inches to as tall as her current four feet. Some beings were exceptionally large though, and still impressed her with there overall size and mass.
The face was obvious. Broken flattened nose, one tusk jutting up from a lower lip, eyes the color of the bottom of a deep well. An ogre. An especially big variety that looked like the sort who would bench press truck engines. Of the tractor-trailer variety.
"Eeep," said Tangent, not especially feeling up to fighting off an ogre at this time.
"You're blocking the teleport receptacle, miss, would you care to mosey on?" The ogre indicated the platform that Tangent had landed on.
"Oh, of course," said Tangent, quickly moving off. A glance behind revealed the ogre taking a rag out of one pocket and cleaning off the intricate pattern carved into the platform before ambling off. Tangent checked her skin, and decided that it was probably time for another bath. Gremlins were, as a rule, rather clean entities as their bodies broke down and neutralized all sorts of toxic substances. Still, gremlin sweat could sometimes get mildly corrosive. Not enough to be harmful to living tissues, but metals and plastics could be slowly deteriorated if kept in contact with these acidic oils. Plants, on the other hand, often benefited from these same oils, so a dry 'bath' involving rubbing herself with leaves still attached to a tree or bush would do as well as a more traditional bath involving water.
Of course, if she could get some lye and or pumice soap, a good steaming hot soak sounded suitably relaxing. Maybe even setting aside some of the lye for a tasty mug or two. Still, it wasn't particularly urgent at the moment, and if she didn't keep moving at least a little, she'd get trampled in the crowd.
Moving with the general flow of people, Tangent was able to see how bizarre her environment truly was. A ship went floating overhead, despite the fact that it was breaking laws of aerodynamics in so doing. The ship was built to resemble some huge barracuda and was made largely of wood. Her senses were able to tell that the fish-ship had some odd combination of technology and magic keeping it up, but not the details. Something worth looking into later perhaps.
The crowd triggering a touch of claustrophobia, Tangent popped down to her true height of eight inches and manifested her wings, flying up to the height of the majority of the roofs nearby - about three stories. Away from the crowded and cramped street, she could see literally dozens of the aircraft, everything from simple barges to ornate fantastic craft modeled on either fish designs or birds of some kind. Magical carpets and brooms competed for airspace with winged elves and ships that could have been sketched out by Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. Sylphs and pixies could be seen flitting about on their own errands, along with some who were clearly wizards using spells to bypass the crowds below.
Something else beckoned her attention. A clock tower thrust up from the labyrinth of streets below, showing the time as being six o' clock. Why then was the sun directly overhead?
Another dark shadow passed overhead, and Tangent suppressed a flinch. A dragon, huge and powerful looking, cruising through the air without more than a glance at her. If that much. You could never be sure with dragons.
Tangent blinked at the realization. Here, in *this* city, even though she had seen no fellow gremlins - she would merely be slightly exotic. Unlike the last world, she could fit in here with nary a care. The question remained - what now?
* * *
Captain Penn Straum shook his head at the unintentional antics of one of his new deckhands. "'Take my nephew for a voyage or two, Straum,' he said, 'the boy will be a natural with the lines and rigging,' he said." The grizzled dwarven captain snorted. "What the addle-brained ninny neglects to tell me is that Davin is barely of age and is still going through one of those growth spurts that turn the exceptionally awkward into the truly graceful! Assuming that they even survive the experience!"
Capt. Straum watched as the lanky elven lad in question tripped over his own feet while attempting to secure one of the mooring lines to the air dock. Something that Straum would have to have words with his first mate about, but the lad *had* seemed to be getting over his awkward period lately, so perhaps their wasn't anything untoward about the matter after all. Still, the boy's family probably expected him back in reasonably good health at some point, and telling them that the lad had gotten himself killed in Emeraldis while attempting to perform a routine task would probably be a bad thing.
Just as the dwarven captain was about to call out for one of the crew to relieve the young elf and send him up to the ship (and relative safety doing something else useful instead), the boy did indeed stumble again. This time falling off of the air dock all together. Capt. Straum noted in mute horror that the safety line that was supposed to prevent green hands from falling to their deaths had somehow become wrapped around the lad's neck.
Sure enough, the poor elven lad stopped, but oddly enough without the sudden jerk. Capt. Straum looked on in stunned disbelief as the line that would have doomed the boy was still slack, Davin having been caught by a green woman who had suddenly appeared standing on the side of the wall.
* * *
Tangent was still flitting around, looking at the strange air ships, when she saw one of the various linesmen stumble and fall off of his perch. Zipping over to intercept the unfortunate individual, she popped back up to her four foot size, planted her feet on the wall, and extended an arm out. She was still nearly knocked off the wall when she caught the fellow though, and it took her a moment to steady herself after having slid back several feet. Once she was sure of her bearing, Tangent started walking up the wall to where he had fallen from.
"Ah, thanks miss..." the boy halted awkwardly as he stared at how the green woman with the tail was simply walking up the wall as if it were the ground. Sure, there were spells that simulated spider-like abilities, but all of the ones that he heard about required that the recipient actually crawl along the surface in question like a spider.
"You're welcome!" Tangent chirped, happy to have helped. "You might want to unwrap the safety line from around your neck," she further advised. "That could prove nasty of even fatal if nobody is around to catch you. Besides, your grip is squishing my breast, so I'd thank you to at least shift it to some other location."
"Oh! Ah... sure!" the young elf stammered, embarrassed. He hastily removed the line from his neck and shifted about uncertainly, not knowing where to hold on to this girl once he was done. "Err... My name is Davin Quesyph..."
"And I'm Tangent. Pleased to meet you!"
"If you don't mind me asking... How are you doing that?"
"Doing what?"
"Y'know... Walking up the wall like that?"
"Well, first I put one foot in front of the other," Tangent explained as if to someone *really* young, "and then I do the same with the other foot. Just repeat the cycle as needed and pretty soon simple bipedal locomotion will get you just about anywhere you care to go..."
"I meant on the wall..." Davin clarified uncertainly.
"Oh, that! Localized gravitic anomaly!" Tangent beamed at the lad, glad he wasn't as slow as he first appeared to be.
"And that means?" Davin wondered why he was asking. She was obviously some kind of spell caster, given her vocabulary, and she might do something dreadful if he kept asking her how she did things. For example, she might answer his questions.
Sure enough, Tangent launched happily into a lecture about how gremlins could stand, walk, or even run along any surface that they are at least in rough contact with, as if that surface was where the plane of gravity was pulling them. Jumping with this ability wasn't advisable unless the gremlins in question could either be sure of a 'landing' point, or could manifest wings and fly.
Davin came to the conclusion that Tangent was indeed a mage of some sort, as she continued her lecture even after setting him back down on the dock he had fallen from. Granted, she changed topics from describing gremlin abilities to what kind of knots would be useful for mooring lines, but Davin had been hearing that one for nearly a month now anyway...
* * *
Captain Penn Straum was sufficiently happy at the survival of young Davin that all Tangent had to do was mention that she was thirsty and they ended up in a tavern.
Well, *after* an interesting docking at some weird airport. Square swimming pool like "docking pads" on one side, pavement and what looked like hammocks elsewhere.
This particular ship landed in one of the little ponds. It turned out to be a cargo transport carrying something called "toofa leaves" and clockwork mechanisms from someplace called "Nihon".
Which brought Tangent to one of the taverns located around the "airport" looking over the odd drink list.
There was small beer, of course. Also ales and beers and wines, feywine and something called "skullcrush", another thing called "dwarvil" and something else called "hobgoblin cocktail."
"Got anything with arsenic and some trace metals?" Tangent asked the waitress, not terribly surprised that a waitress around here was a seven foot tall human female radiating magic from several concealed weapons.
The waitress gave an inquiring look to the dwarf who merely shrugged. "I'll see what I can find."
"If not, I'll have whatever's the most toxic," Tangent amended, hoping not to put the waitress too far out of her way.
"So," Capt. Straum started once the waitress had left, "Ye seem to have some experience with ships, Miss Tangent."
"Some," Tangent admitted, wondering how to explain the multiple templates that comprised her collective experience. After a moment, she decided to just treat it as if she was a melding of all of them, which was true enough anyway. "My grandfather used to take me sailing from time to time. I was supposed to get his boat after he passed on, but grandma sold it before it could be turned over to me..."
"That's terrible!" Davin exclaimed.
"Depends on your point of view," Tangent stated. "I was too young to take responsibility for it at the time anyway, although I'd have liked to have at least gotten some say in the matter." She shifted tact from her former human existence at this point, combining that of two of her other aspects instead. "Anyway, I got some more experience serving on nautical vessels for Veridia, as well as on aircrafts for Silica. When it didn't eat into my training that is."
"So you *are* a spell caster!" Davin proclaimed, feeling that his earlier observation had been correct. Capt. Straum said nothing, being content to listen for now.
"In a manner of speaking, although not much more than any other warrior caste gremlin is."
"Gremlin?" Davin had never heard of gremlins. Capt. Straum, on the other hand, had heard of them, but knew of several varieties. Some innately good, some just as naturally evil, and most deriving from faerie kind. A handful of the rest where actually incorrectly identified as gremlins when they were actually something else, whether they were imps or transformed mogwai.
"Techno-sprites, derived from the old Fey Tuin race that the faeries came from," Tangent explained. "We branched off due to our affinities for cold-iron and toxins. The records are poor, but it is commonly believed that our ancestors were cursed to become gremlins due to these immunities. It's hard to say for sure though."
"Like tinker gnomes?" Davin was horrified, having had several bad encounters with tinker gnome inventions already.
"Don't be insulting," Tangent admonished. "A gremlin's prerogative is making and breaking, and a gremlin's vocation is to do either of those well. Tinker gnome devices are amusing, but please, don't compare us with a race of self-defeatists!"
"What do you mean?" Davin asked.
"What she means, lad," Capt. Straum interjected, "is that a tinker gnome that actually succeeds in completing their life quest and invents something that works, is considered to be a failure."
"Well, I *will* admit that, on average, tinker gnomes are more creative than most gremlins. We are very good at tinkering with and repairing existing devices, or demolishing things, but few of us have the inventive spark to actually come up with something new. That's why we like to hang around humans and other creative races so much. We have this great drive to be industrious, to build and destroy things, but without that creative spark to direct us we tend to be at loose ends..."
The conversation was interrupted briefly by the arrival of their drinks. Tangent sipped hers and noted with some disappointment that the toxins were purely alcoholic in nature. Not that she was drinking to get a buzz, as alcohol did nothing of the sort for gremlins (some breeds drank rocket fuel to relax, some required neurotoxins to simply knock them out for a while - Tangent's variety tended to get sleepy with chocolate). No, what Tangent was after was something to make her too poisonous to eat for a while, which was the main reason most gremlins seek to supplement their diets with toxins.
Most alcohols simply weren't lethal enough, and even when they were, tended to be metabolized and broken down into something harmless too quickly by gremlin physiologies. Not that the practice did much good on worlds like Silica, where the native flora and fauna was so poisonous that a gremlin couldn't hope to become toxic enough for the wildlife to consider them inedible.
"If ye be needin' work, I could always use another hand that knows her way around a ship," Capt. Straum offered. "Ye said that ye were warrior caste?"
"Yep! Sixty plus years of training in the Alpha/Omega School of Weapon Mastery, some training in unarmed combat, and Master Marksman with any ranged weapon that I can aim myself!" Tangent stated proudly.
"Well, how good can she be, if she doesn't have any equipment..." Davin mumbled, looking the nude gremlin over jealously, feeling that his position on the Hammers High was being threatened. Capt. Straum silenced him with a glare.
"I don't have any equipment because I don't have anything that can change scale when I do. It's a bit awkward traveling with anything to have to have two or more sizes for everything," Tangent stated. "Besides, my instructors in the Alpha/Omega School of Weapon Mastery would be disappointed in me if I couldn't make a weapon to use in a battle that I had enough warning about."
"Make a weapon?" Davin was a bit taken back by this. "Like a club or a staff or something, right?"
"Staves are good, but there's also swords, axes, pole arms, crossbows, siege engines..."
"You can..."
"Kid, the motto of the Alpha/Omega School is: To build a weapon is to know it, and you must first construct one of its type if you want to learn to use it. Live with this weapon. Eat, sleep and breathe with it. Dance, sing and celebrate with it. Mourn, grieve and suffer with it. To master a weapon, you must then destroy what you have constructed. For then you will know its beginning and end."
"Perhaps ye'd be better off signin' up with the Shadarian Explorer Corps instead, lass," Capt. Straum sighed. "I couldn't possibly pay ye what ye'd be worth to a ship like mine."
"If you say so..." Tangent replied uncertainly.
"Aye, I say so," Capt. Straum insisted. "Besides, I may end up bein' paid to haul yer ass around on my ship anyway, and in any event ye'd be makin' more than I could pay ye straight up! We'll just head for City Hall on the morrow and get ye an application. Ye should do well, as I don't know of any other gremlins in the S.E.C. Ye could explore some of the toxic zones for them at the very least."
"Well," Tangent admitted, "it sounds interesting at any rate..."
END CHAPTER TWO...